Planning for the unexpected is unquestionably a good idea for anybody starting a business. But Rick Moser and Dan Dillman put a new twist on that maxim: They started a business built around the possibility of the unexpected.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette Rick Moser, left, and Dan Dillman are partners in the technology company Applications2U. Click photo for larger image.

What does your company do? Our company is what you would call an application services provider. We run the applications on our servers, and our servers are kept in a highly secure facility in Downtown Pittsburgh. Our servers are basically high-powered desktops. We load all the applications on our equipment and customers can then get access to them anywhere in the world on the Internet. When they launch the application, it works just like it would if it were located on their desktop. We now have a total of about 10 people involved in our company .

How did all of this get started? We met while we both worked at Federal Express. What gave us the idea was that while we were there, we would build these [information technology] environments for Fortune 500 companies that required that their data and systems have availability all the time -- backup power, backup data, etc. So we thought it would be a great idea to provide that level of service to mid-sized and small companies that can't afford to invest in that level of service.

You mentioned that SCORE -- Service Corps of Retired Executives -- was really helpful in getting things going. How so? Anybody starting a business really should sit down with SCORE. They help you go through your business plan, figure out what you can do and what you should and should not do. We sat down with them, and asked them to be realistic about what we wanted to do.

They said, "Hey, this thing you are building, you can keep your full-time job and eliminate the risk for yourselves such as having to make money today to keep going." We thought that made a lot of sense, so we still have full-time jobs. I work at a local bank and Dan works for a health organization.

It's really best for us to work full time elsewhere because we don't have the expense of providing benefits for ourselves, putting ourselves on salaries, or how we're going to pay mortgages. We hired other people to do the work for our business through the day-to-day operations while we plan and do the engineering and work on things for our company at night. In the meantime, we have full-time tech people who always are monitoring the system 24/7.

What did you learn at FedEx that is helpful to you now? The biggest thing that I learned at FedEx and PNC is the importance of taking a look at how you engineer a platform to make sure the data is safe, secure and available at any time. That's the biggest key -- our customers want safety.

How did and do you find customers? We bring in independent sales consultants that have a number of contacts of their own. They have experience in information technology, and they've been able to open doors for us and get us into places that we may not have been able to get into ourselves.

We also visit small business associations or groups where people are getting together and talking about ways to improve their businesses. We will do speaking engagements, go out and do presentations and do other things to let people know what we are about and how we can help their companies. We generate a lot of leads and referrals that way.

I understand your help was crucial to one business during last September's flood. Yes, that was Business Legal . Lynn Emerson was our first client . We put all her data on our platform. Then the big flood hit, and her whole office [in Oakdale] was wiped out -- desktops, file cabinets, paper-work, everything. Anything inside that office was now unusable.

We went down that very next morning to see if there was anything we could do because we knew her area was hit hard. As it worked out, she set up office in her home and was operating out of her home the very next day. She calls us the great computer in the sky because she can go anywhere in the world and pull up her data, check e-mails and do anything.